


Scent Memory

by featherxquill



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Mentions of Character Death, Mostly Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 15:37:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherxquill/pseuds/featherxquill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Smell is the sense most closely linked with memory. Helen Magnus has a lot of memories, and sometimes, she likes to let her favourite scents take her back to them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scent Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Arwen for the encouragement, and for looking this over for me :). 
> 
> Also, this is my first fic in a new (to me) fandom. Kudos is always appreciated, if you enjoy, but comments are love, if you are willing/able :).

_You need to relax, Magnus. Take a few days off, go somewhere, get away from everything. It’s important to unwind._

Will’s voice echoes in Helen Magnus’ mind as she closes her bedroom door and shrugs off her jacket. She feels heavy, worn down to the edges. It has been a trying day.

After a three year pregnancy, the Thracis finally gave birth, but both its young were born with severe defects, and despite Helen’s best efforts, died a few hours later. Will found Helen outside the enclosure, just standing there, staring through the glass as the creature tore apart her habitat. Helen had watched silently as the Thracis woke from the drugs she’d been given during and post-labour (Thracis birth was typically violent and traumatic; many wild females did not survive it), found the lifeless bodies of her young, howled fury over their corpses, and, after burying them beneath her sleeping den, uprooted a tree from the ground nearby and hurled it into a wall.

Will appeared moments later, carrying a stunner and shouting for help. His eyes passed over Helen as he barrelled into the enclosure, but he didn't call her name. Helen watched while Will and Kate brought down the raging, grief-stricken mother with stunners, and waited while Will sprinted to the lab for a syringe of sedative to calm the creature, but she disappeared before he re-emerged from the enclosure.

Not that that stopped him. He found her half an hour later, and after surveying her with those piercing, too-knowing eyes, gave her the benefit of his _professional opinion_.

Helen has no intention of going anywhere, but she supposes Will is right in some respects. She has been pushing herself hard lately, and it is taking its toll on her. Not to mention that watching a mother mourn the loss of its children has a particularly strong effect on her, now. She has to remind herself that it is not weakness to admit that, that is it alright to not feel fine. She supposes she does need to unwind.

It amuses her, though, that Will seems to think she has not learned any strategies for relaxation and self-care in the course of her long life. He also shows a complete lack of creativity in assuming that the only thing that might work for her, and allow her to switch off from the running of this place, is to leave it completely.

No; a control-freak she might be, and not a woman who allows herself to relax very often (for above all else, Helen Magnus fears the trap of ennui and procrastination, that she might somehow stop to relax and never start again, that she might not keep up, lose touch, live forever but become irrelevant), but when she chooses to, she certainly does know _how_.

Helen unbuttons her blouse as she approaches her dresser, letting it fall open as she tugs the top drawer out. Inside, there are neat rows of candles, all scented and sealed in individual jars. Helen runs a finger over the right-hand column, considering, then lifts one from its place and removes the lid, inhaling deeply and closing her eyes. Pine and wood-smoke, the Christmases of her childhood. Mother sitting on Father’s knee, laughter and golden ribbon. Helen smiles and re-caps the candle, sets it back in its place.

She touches her finger to another lid, then another, searching for memories that match her mood.

Smell has always had a strong influence on Helen. The sense most closely associated with memory, she knows ( _smells, processed by the olfactory bulb, part of the limbic system, where memories are stored_ , says her scientific mind, though of course the experience is somewhat different), and so she has built up a wide array of associations over the years, some of which are quite unusual. The smell of blood, for example, or gangrenous flesh, makes many people nauseous, but for Helen, with her medical training and many years of practise both in operating theatres and on battlegrounds, they provide a sharpness of mind, pull her into a sense of attention and focus unlike any other she knows. Likewise the stench of death, that rotting sweetness, makes others cringe and gag, but for Helen it merely evokes sadness. A person unable to be helped, who died alone and forgotten for long enough that nature began to take hold. The smell of gun-oil and cordite, which had made Ashley feel powerful, if the way her behaviour had changed when holding a weapon was anything to go on, was for Helen always associated with regret. The last resort when other means of control failed and a situation was beyond redemption.

There are some scents she despises. The tarry smell of carbolic soap is one of them; it’s enough to make her shudder. It reminds her of the cold dormitories of the London boarding school she attended for three years in her teens – washing in a basin on frosty winter mornings – and of her years of training and work as a nurse in the 1860s, fighting to keep her hands and the hospital rooms clean and being repeatedly refused entry to medical schools while the patients died around her for want of adequate medical care.

But Helen has lived a long, eventful and fortunate life, and there are many smells that transport her directly to the places and times when she was happiest. These are the ones she returns to. Reaching into the drawer, she opens another candle-jar and breathes deeply.

Ashley was born in August of 1986, a full hundred years after Helen injected the source blood serum and granted herself eternal life. Helen remembers liking the symmetry of it, when she finally gave in and had the embryo implanted; a century separating the two most significant events of her life. Like most mothers, Helen doesn’t remember much of the labour process; it’s a blur of exhaustion and pain and the drugs she took to ease it. She remembers the birth, of course, the moment when Ashley drew her first screaming breath, and the next, when Bigfoot – friend and midwife, grunting from the concentration but smiling with his eyes – draped the newborn, tiny and damp, across Helen’s heaving belly. But the moment she remembers best happened somewhat later. After the initial bonding and feeding, mother and daughter took a well-deserved nap to recover from the ordeal of labour. During that time, Bigfoot must have moved them, because when Helen woke she found herself in the infirmary. It was late morning, and the sun streamed in through the windows, which were open to the summer air. Wafting in from the garden were the scents of geranium and cherry blossom, and they seemed to fill Helen’s nostrils as she turned her head to gaze at the tiny, sleeping form of the daughter she’d waited so long for.

Helen smiles. Although it is a memory tinged with sadness now, she still remembers being so full of love and hope that there barely seemed room in her heart for anything else. This, she thinks, setting the candle on the dresser, is one that she will light tonight. For the Thracis mother. May she know that peace someday.

The next candle takes Helen even further back into her memories. It’s coconut and strawberry, sugar-sweet, like the icing on the teacakes that were served on the day Helen’s aunt, Rose, and her cousins, Cécile and Jacqueline, came to visit, when she was eight. They lived in Paris, Aunt Rose’s adopted home, and Helen remembers licking the sticky pink icing off her fingers when no one was looking, so that it wouldn’t stain the white dress her mother had put her in to meet these people for the first time. Her cousins were of an age with her - Cécile a month or two older, and Jacqueline a year younger, and after tea, they all went out to the garden so the girls could play together. It was fun, briefly, until Cécile and Jacqueline became frustrated with the words they couldn’t say in English, and instead began speaking to each other in a whispery, curling language that Helen didn’t understand. She remembers running back to her mother, trying hard not to cry but failing, because she so desperately wanted to be included and get to know these girls she’d never met before, but she couldn’t.

It wasn’t her mother that comforted her, however, but her aunt. Tugging Helen toward her and wiping the tears from her cheeks, Aunt Rose cupped her hands around Helen’s shoulders and spoke to her in a voice that was softer and rounder than her mother’s, but still recognisably English.

“There, now, _ma chérie_. I know how you feel. When I first moved to France, I could not speak the language either, and it was strange, and sometimes lonely. But I learned, and you can too. You can learn any language you want to, and then you’ll be able to speak to anyone.”

It was a revelatory moment for Helen – that there were people in the world who spoke languages she didn’t understand, but that she could _learn_ to speak like them, rather than hoping that they could speak like her. From that moment on, Helen became a passionate student of languages – from the practical to the ancient, and later, the non-human.

Helen never saw her Aunt Rose again. Like her sister – Helen’s mother – she died less than a decade later, but Helen will never forget the sense of possibility that she brought with her and passed along to her niece. For Helen, possibility will always smell like coconut cake with strawberry icing. She sets that candle atop the dresser as well.

There are other scents, other memories that she knows are not the ones that match her mood, but she can’t help but sample them anyway. Triumph is bergamot and cranberry, like the sauce served with the turkey – a meat she’d never tasted before – at the restaurant in New York in 1913, when Helen had finally found a suitable location for her new Sanctuary. It was a beautiful old church, complete with monastery and catacombs, and was in bad need of restoration work that the Catholic administrators were not willing to spend on it, given the declining number of parishioners who had attended service there in recent years. Helen had made a generous offer to purchase it, the Church had accepted, and the sale finalised that morning. Helen, staying in New York at the time, was taken to dinner by her then-lover for a celebratory toast to her success.

Violet and musk is the smell of sex. Just opening the jar is enough to send a bolt of heat through her. It’s not just any sex, either. Not her first time, but certainly an experience that changed her. Berlin, 1934, where Helen met a met a woman called Ines, who styled her dark hair in a bob and pinned a violet to the lapel of her jacket. She wore a ring on every finger and smoked a cigarette on a long stem, and knew more about molecular biology than anyone Helen had ever met. They studied a rare creature together during the day, and then in the evening Ines took Helen out to a club she frequented, full of women who wore trousers and even monocles. Some were in skirts, like Helen, but they all had violets pinned to their clothes, and their fingers trailed up each other’s arms just a little too familiarly to be only friends. Helen and Ines had too many drinks that night, and danced up close to each other in the crowd, and when the night was over they ended it in Ines’ bed. Helen had never been with a woman before (although she’d been conscious of her potential attraction to them for some time), but she learned quickly, and she’ll never forget the musky smell of Ines’ perfume when she kissed her throat, or the deeper musk of her sex as Helen’s tongue slid up her thigh. By the time they finished, the sheets were covered with it, the smell of both of them, perfumed and animal, mingled with the aroma of the violet that had fallen from Ines’ jacket and been crushed beneath a thigh. What remaining Victorian propriety Helen still possessed had vanished that night.

There’s mango, too: India, 1972, an exhilarating hunt for a rare abnormal who ate only that fruit. The trees stretched for miles, and the animal was elusive, so Helen stayed in the nearby workers’ village for weeks while she sought it. She remembers that the trees grew right up to the huts, and in the morning she would rise with the workers, yawn and stretch, and eat the fruit straight from the trees. Mint conjures a similar memory: Touareg tea in Mali, 1963, a group of empaths afflicted with a contagious depression that they sought Helen’s help to find a treatment for. Helen was an earl grey sort of woman, but she found that, along with other treatments, a cup of tea never went astray when one was feeling down. There are other scents, too, jars she will leave stoppered this time because it is far too easy to get lost in memories when one has so many of them.

She knows which one she wants, really. Lifts it out of its place and removes the lid.

Sandalwood, cinnamon and honey. It’s Egypt with Nikola in the years after the First World War, sun on her back and sand between her toes. Baking hot during the day and frigid at night, spending months of the year at her Sanctuaries and then running off to the desert to dig for mummies with a sarcastic vampire. Sandalwood was the incense they burned in the tent at night to cover the stench of their bodies when they couldn’t wash. She remembers it clinging to her clothes and skin during the day; sweating spice. One year, they found themselves in Cairo during Ramadan, and were invited to celebrate the Eid with the families of their desert guides. The feast went on long into the night, their plates piled high with Kahk and Qatayef and small round donuts that were dusted with cinnamon and crunchy on the outside, but soft and syrupy when she bit into them.

“I can’t abide this much food,” she remembers Nikola saying, too much the vampire, as he surreptitiously slid desserts from his plate to hers, only to have an enthusiastic host pile his plate high again moments later. She remembers being very, very full that night.

Most of all, though, it’s the sense of that time she remembers and loves best. It was an endless adventure, breaking from life, spending time with a friend she could bicker with in one breath and flirt with in the next. There was sense of exploration and competition, with nothing at stake but their egos. That’s what the smell holds for her, now – a time when making mistakes meant nothing more than finishing in second place.

Freedom and carelessness. Peace. Possibility. Flowers, sugar, and spice. Some might say that those three scents would war against each other, could not possibly go together at all. But then, those people have not lived a life as wildly rich and varied as Helen has.

She takes her chosen selection to the bathroom, shedding her clothes as she goes. She runs a bath, pours herself a glass of wine. Then she lights her candles, sinks down into the hot water, and bathes herself in memories.

Why should she need to go anywhere when there is so much of the world already in her head?


End file.
